This article tells what we could have learned, or possibly still can learn, from the British experience in 1839 which led to "15,000 men, women and children, soldiers, families and camp followers (being) massacred by Afghan tribesmen in the passes of Kabul ..." It is a story of " vainglorious and arrogant invaders who plunged headlong towards destruction," (quote is paraphrased).
----------------------------------------
The Empire Strikes Out / By BEN MACINTYRE /
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR / NY Times / May 8, 2004
LONDON — This week the world learned that the United States Army has been
investigating more than 30 claims of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan since
December 2002. So far, officials have found a catalog of "sadistic, blatant
and wanton criminal abuses" at the hands of American captors. This horrible
scandal represents the most serious crisis for the coalition since the war
on terrorism began. Occupation inevitably creates resentment; but humiliation
fosters
outright rebellion, and winning back the moral high ground after this calamity
is far more important than reasserting control in Falluja or in the Taliban-controlled
areas of Afghanistan.
Military domination is fatally undermined when occupiers, even if only a tiny
minority of them, misuse their power to demean the conquered. The perils of
such behavior resonate throughout history. As America finds itself ever more
deeply
embroiled in Central Asia and Iraq, it need only look at the experience of
its coalition partner, Britain, in Afghanistan to learn about the hubris and
transience
of empire.
Curiously enough, the most astute witness to one of Britain's worst
imperial episodes was an American — a doctor, soldier, Quaker, Freemason and adventurer
by the name of Josiah Harlan. In 1839, General Harlan (as he chose to style himself)
stood on the ramparts of Kabul and watched as a foreign army marched in to "liberate" the
city, with flags waving and trumpets blaring. General Harlan had spent the previous
12 years in Afghanistan, and he had a premonition of disaster: "To subdue
and crush the masses of a nation by military force," he later wrote, "is
to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary
and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe."
The current situation in Afghanistan appears, if not peaceful, then manageable,
at least compared to Iraq. Coalition troops are working alongside the indomitable
Afghans to rebuild a country shattered by two decades of war. But as always
in Afghanistan, peace is fragile. Much of the country remains riven by the
fiefs
of competing warlords, the government's authority beyond Kabul varies from
tenuous to nonexistent, and the still-rising toll of American dead is a reminder
that
the Taliban is far from vanquished.
Over the centuries, successive foreign armies have tried to pacify
Afghanistan — Macedonian,
Mogul, Persian, British, Russian and Soviet — only to discover that this
deeply divided land has a way of uniting furiously against any invader that
does not tread with the utmost care. As America is discovering, with much of
the Islamic
world united in outrage over the images of Iraqi captives being abused by servicemen
and women, maintaining the peace is a far more delicate and demanding task
than winning the war.
No one knew this better than Josiah Harlan. While many of his contemporaries
were exploring the Wild West, Harlan had headed for the rather wilder East.
Eccentric, cantankerous, ambitious and ludicrously brave, he plunged into the
unmapped wilds
of Afghanistan in 1827, determined to make himself a king.
General Harlan was no stranger to hubris. Over the ensuing years he parlayed
with princes and potentates, led an army across the Hindu Kush mounted on an
elephant, and was appointed commander in chief of the Afghan Army by Dost Muhammad
Khan, the mighty emir of Kabul. Finally, by striking a pact with native chiefs
high in the Hindu Kush, General Harlan became prince of Ghor, a potentate in
his own right.
But his reign was short-lived. By 1839, the British, in a decision
with eerie modern echoes, opted to remove Dost Muhammad and replace him with
a more pliable
puppet. The emir was a threat to stability, London declared, an unpredictable
autocrat ruling a rogue state. A vast army was assembled in British India,
and marched on Kabul: Dost Muhammad's bodyguards melted away, and the ousted
ruler
took to the hills. When they entered the city, the British found General Harlan
calmly having breakfast. The American introduced himself as "a free and
enlightened citizen of the greatest and most glorious country in the world."
The British settled in, importing foxhounds, cricket bats, amateur
theatricals and all the appurtenances of empire. After an easy victory, it
was assumed
that the Afghans were docile. The invaders rode roughshod over the local culture,
treating the Afghans with disdain, oblivious to the growing rumble of discontent.
General Harlan was outraged at such arrogance: "I have seen this country,
sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion
of senseless stranger boors, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes."
What would he have made of his own country's forays into Afghanistan and Iraq
nearly two centuries later? In some respects he might have approved. He believed
strongly in using military force to bring civilization to the benighted of
the earth. He was no friend to tyrants and religious fanatics: he would have
been
equally revolted by the extremism of the Taliban and the brutality of Saddam
Hussein.
Yet he was also insistent that the imperial impulse brought with it heavy responsibilities,
an obligation to treat indigenous cultures with respect, to work within local
power structures. He saw the British occupation through the eyes of an Afghan,
but his response was that of an American; instead of bringing enlightenment,
he believed, the British had imposed their own heavy-handed tyranny, and would
pay the price in anger and bloodshed. Today, 165 years later, it is America's
turn to stand accused of brutal occupation, as the grim and graphic secrets
of Abu Ghraib prison are revealed.
Josiah Harlan warned the British of the growing danger, but his words went
unheeded. The occupying British swiftly bundled this interfering American out
of Kabul,
and carried on with their imperial tea party, alternately abusing and offending
Afghans.
" Vainglorious and arrogant, the invaders plunged headlong towards destruction," General Harlan wrote in an angry anti-British polemic, as he headed home to America, and obscurity. Within two years the entire British garrison, 15,000 men, women and children, soldiers, families and camp followers, was massacred by Afghan tribesmen in the passes of Kabul, leaving a single wounded survivor, Dr. William Brydon, to stagger into Jalalabad with news of the worst disaster in British imperial history.
Ben Macintyre is the author of "The Man Who Would Be
King: The First American in Afghanistan."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company